Zhuangzi
c. 369 – c. 286 BCE · State of Song, China
The Daoist sceptic who dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure whether he was a man who had dreamed or a butterfly now dreaming.
Key ideas
Zhuangzi questioned whether any single perspective can claim to be the right one. Distinctions such as right and wrong, useful and useless, or this and that depend on where you stand. He used stories, jokes and dialogues rather than arguments to loosen the reader's grip on fixed categories.
His most famous story, the butterfly dream, raises the same question as René Descartes's dream argument nearly two thousand years earlier: how can you know you are not dreaming now? Where Descartes treated the question as a problem to solve, Zhuangzi seems to treat it as an invitation to hold one's identity more lightly. It belongs alongside the brain in a vat and skepticism entries.
He also wrote memorably about death, refusing to mourn his wife in the ordinary way on the grounds that she had simply changed form, like the passing of the seasons.
Life, briefly
Very little is reliably known. Zhuang Zhou was a minor official in the state of Song during the Warring States period. One story has him turning down an offer to become a chief minister, saying he would rather drag his tail in the mud like a living turtle than be a dead one honoured in a temple.
Major works
- The Zhuangzi, of which the seven 'inner chapters' are usually thought to be his own
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Zhuangzi
- WikipediaZhuang Zhou